Text by Fatima Belkis

The poster shows a woman holding a large needle in her left hand. She is grasping the needle firmly, her left fist in the air. This gesture might be familiar to those who are aware of left-wing demonstrations. The needle is already threaded. The red coloured thread is laid out to form the text that reads “Women in Hebron”. Women in Hebron is a young co-op founded in 2005; as a part of the Idna Cooperative Association for Embroidery and Handicraft. Idna is a city close to Hebron in the West Bank, Palestine.

My great-grandmother was a weaver. She did not want to live with her husband anymore after he married a second wife. So she moved. She did not have sheep, so she got the wool from the co-op in town. She dyed wool and made yarn (or maybe she made the yarn first, I don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of the process), then she took the dyed yarn back to the co-op to be sold. Then she got a loom, started weaving rugs, and took them to the co-op to be sold. That was how she provided for herself and her family.

I have a red wool rug that she made more than 70 years ago in Alanya, in a house that no longer exists. It is one of the rugs she decided not to sell for some reason. I have been carrying this rug with me everywhere I have lived, even though I cannot use it because of my allergies. They were not this bad when I was younger but they got worse after 30. But I do not read into it.

Producer’s cooperatives that lost their original brilliance and profitability with the liberal economy, consumerism and over-production, became an arena of struggle for slow production and small-scale producers in the 2000s.

Women in Hebron has a running website and permanent shop. 150 women are producing embroidered clothing and decorative items, the sale of which provides income for themselves, and they also made it possible for The Idna Cooperative Association to open a community centre.

Bio

Fatma Belkıs was born in Antalya in 1985. She now lives in İstanbul. She works with text, video, and printed matter either individually or collectively with friends. Even though as an artist, she is strictly interested in people going through some kind of a transformation, specifically with the ones who do not go through this alone, in her personal life she prefers to live with cats instead of people.

She studied Visual Arts and Communication Design in İstanbul some time ago. Her works were shown in İstanbul and Sharjah Biennials and in institutions such as İstanbul Modern, DEPO, nGbK, Tensta Konsthall. The films she has directed were shown at international film festivals in Turkey and Europe.